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Stinchcombe

James Stinchcombe
Prof. Beraha
RUSS 337
24 September 2019

Bad Art and Sentimentality

Think not for this, however, the poor treason

Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity,—let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay

In Spring in Fialta, Victor lives vicariously through his imagined self. Faced with the

mundane reality of his world, Victor attempts to make meaningful his meaningless life by

imbuing his memories with aesthetic beauty. He becomes an artist working from the material of

a real past, moulding the clay into something he can enjoy. As Victor says, “[…] were I a writer,

I should allow only my heart to have imagination, and for the rest rely upon memory, that long-

drawn sunset shadow of one’s personal truth,” asserting his artistic project will depend on

subjective views of reality: memory and the yearnings of the heart. This essay will trace the

errors in Victor’s aesthetic judgment and lapses into sentimentality to show that Nina becomes a

kitschy creation of Victor’s fancy, and argue that Victor’s act of creating Nina destroys her.

Victor frames his narrative as a fiction. The first paragraph of Fialta places the reader in

the third person, “Far away, in a watery vista between the jagged edges of pale bluish houses

[…] The air is windless and warm, with a faint tang of burning” (Spring in Fialta 413). The

opening catalogues every aspect of the scene, insisting on sensation to place the reader in a

fictional world: the sight of houses slanting down the mountain, the taste and smell of burning,
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and the feeling and sound of the air. The cliché of a third-person omniscient narrator opening a

story by appealing to the senses creates an expectation that the reader will be subjected to fiction.

The feeling of listening to a storyteller is broken in the second paragraph with the

insertion of the first person:

It was on such a day in the early thirties that I found myself, all my senses wide open, on

one of Fialta’s steep little streets, taking in everything at once, that marine rococo on the

stand, and the coral crucifixes in a shop window and the dejected poster of a visiting

circus (Fialta 413).

The initial, “It was on such a day,” implies that the opening paragraph describes a day similar to

the one Victor experiences rather than the actual day, mixing the fiction of the first paragraph

with the reality of the second. Victor then recapitulates the description of Fialta, more explicitly

imbuing the reality of the world around him with art: the marine wall is “rococo,” the ephemera

in a shop window becomes iconographic, and the circus poster, which itself is used by Victor to

foreshadow Nina’s death, explicitly relates to the drama of show. Victor’s artistic eye permeates

the world with his artistic sensibilities and creates a new reality: the Fialta he relates to us is now

coloured by the ornate drama of rococo, the significance of Christianity, and an omen of death.

Victor’s memories of Nina are especially fictive. By the time of Victor’s description of

his first meeting with Nina the reader has become finely attuned to Victor’s malleable view of

the world. In his memory of the mansion, he shows a desire for perfection by eliminating all but

the essentials for remembering Nina: “did the watchmen invite us to look at a sullen red glow in

the sky, portent of nearing arson? Possibly. Did we go to admire an equestrian statue of ice

sculptured near the pond by the Swiss tutor of my cousins? Quite as likely” (Fialta 416). Victor

treats the events of his memory as interchangeable objects, able to be eliminated and appended as
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he likes. What matters is not their reality, but their place in the narrative; the two events are

included only to develop the motif of fire and white horses. From the act of including simple

metaphors to colour his world, in the presence of Nina, Victor moves to the act of changing the

world.

Victor focuses on his memory of his aunt’s mansion because it is the only time his love

for Nina is requited. It is clear to him that she does not remember him during their later string of

passing meetings by perceiving Nina’s recollection of “a vague sketch of warm, pleasant

friendship, which in reality had never existed between us” (Fialta 418). Victor goes along with

Nina’s mistake; he is willing to debase their relationship with fiction in order to have greater

access to her, but their mode of friendship is problematically vapid. Upon many of their later

meetings, Victor once again must repopulate an empty space in Nina’s memory: “she had not

seemed to recognize me at once” (414), “[…] until she grew aware of us” (418); showing that

their relationship never really grows. Nina never specifically seeks Victor out, all of their

meetings happen by chance: in train stations, at parties, on the street. Despite the clear distance

between them, Victor clings to the fictional warmth between them.

Victor demonstrates the extent of his disconnect with Nina while waiting for her to

materialize in his room, then recalls their past meetings:

[…] how certain I was that without my having to tell her she would steal to my room,

how she did not come, and the din the thousands of crickets made [….] when we met the

pace of life altered at once […] we lived in another, lighter time-medium, which was

measured not by the lengthy separations but by those few meetings of which a short,

supposedly frivolous life was thus artificially formed.

(Fialta 424, 425).

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Victor attaches significance to rooms throughout the story: he calls many of their meeting places

“three-walled rooms” (415), that is, the room of the stage. The way Victor thinks of their

meetings is consistent with the structure of drama: characters are not developed through their

lengthy separations, but through their meetings in three-walled rooms where a skilled playwright

forms entire lives in a collection of interactions. Victor, thinking in the mindset of fiction, thus

expects Nina to fulfil her role as a character and come to him so that the fiction may be

progressed.

Victor treats his meetings with Nina as parts of a collection. At their first meeting he

laments the ruin of what would have been “a perfect ex libris for the book of our two lives”

(Fialta 416) by the fluffy white fringes of snow over the straight line of two pillars with the

irritated dismay of a comic book collector inspecting a smudge on X-MEN #1. When he meets

Nina in Fialta he notes his address to “the Fialta version of Nina” (417), as if carefully

cataloguing each iteration of Nina over the years. The image of the collector conveys a sense in

which Victor seeks to exercise control in his narrative where he is unable to in reality, he needs

an ex libris of their lives to assert his ownership of their story.

By focusing on Nina materialistically, as a collector; his narrative is corrupted by kitsch.

At their meetings, Victor often notes aspects of Nina’s beauty, her “dark-red lips,” (417), and

“small, comfortable body” (418); or he focuses on her purity, “her lemonade sinking with a kind

of childish celerity” (422), and “she ever so willingly gave anyone to drink” (416). The tragedy

of Fialta results from the narrators recognition that this collection is a kind of vandalism against

Nina’s real self:

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I grew apprehensive because something lovely, delicate, and unrepeatable was being

wasted: something which I abused by snapping off poor bright bits in gross haste while

neglecting the modest but true core which perhaps it kept offering me in a pitiful whisper.

(425)

Victor structures this sentence as a progressing distension. The sentence creates a rhythm of

expansion by beginning with a list—intensified by the adverbs and conjunctions “because,”

“and,” “which,” “but,” and “while.” The short sentence unit used to contain these expansions

makes a kind of swollen syntactical unit, tender and vulnerable to the reader’s prodding eye.

Victor’s collection of “bright bits” grow like a tumor as Nina shrinks from his crass greed;

likewise, as Victor’s collection of recollected vignettes grows throughout the story, Nina is

destroyed and vandalized by their kitschy sentiment.

The easily accessible “bright bits” (Fialta 425) Victor collects from Nina are

simultaneously what attracts, and repulses him from her. The infidelities she is willing to

participate in, and which repulse Victor, are what makes her a romantic possibility to him. Victor

simultaneously attempts to claim aesthetic and moral superiority in his narrative in order to assert

his rightful ownership over Nina, but his assertion ultimately fails. While being repulsed by

Nina’s infidelity, he is complicit in it. He tumbles with her in the snow and aches for her in his

hotel room. His art is cheapened by turning Nina into a kind of ephemera to be kept on the shelf.

Victor’s dilemma is ultimately a way to avoid the rejection he knows is appropriate for the

advances of a distant acquaintance, whose literary skill is fully mustered to say, “Look here—

what if I love you? Look here—what if I love you? Never mind, I was only Joking.”

Word Count: 1501

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Works Cited

Nabokov, Vladimir. “Spring in Fialta.” The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, New York: Vintage

International, 2008, pp. 413–429. PG 3476 N3 Z6 1981